An ingenious idea from a new player

I have a brand new player in a party of 4 who is quite bashful. She’s still learning the game and so has been a bit reserved up to this point. When she originally joined the game she wanted to be “something purple”. Somehow she settled on playing a grippli ranger (not a purple thing but she seems interested). To help build backstory, I ask a question of players’ characters at the beginning of each session: what does your character do for hobbies? How did you arrive here? Etc. I figure this is also things the characters would chat about during adventuring anyhow.

For three sessions this new player didn’t really offer much in the way of background other than “I want to find a new kind of fruit.” But last session she shocked me.

The question was “what is your character’s happiest childhood memory?” She describes how her and a grippli friend would stitch together these water lilys and flip them over to use as a sort of makeshift scuba device so they could collect dragonflies from the bottom of the lake and sell them to people. Like a weird grippli lemonade stand. So another player asks “why wouldn’t you just catch dragonflies out of the air?” “They’re too crunchy,” she responds. This was more like a dragonfly caviar of sorts. She even had drawn together the invention on sticky notes and everything.

It was a perfect entrance into a session in which she received a letter (that I hand wrote beforehand) from her family that says they’ve been pillaged and are in dire need of new sources of food (as I, The DM, tried to find a way to get “find fruit” into the game). Now the party is off trying to find a sustainable food source for her family.

Wow, she's a keeper (in the player in a group kind of way). Player that is creative and enjoys creating doesnt have to be a DM to be very useful. Not to brag, but i myself am very creative and with lot of ideas, so that any time someone is stuck in character creation, i can present them with a couple of ideas from the top of my head. With a fairly new group of players, skill like that can be great.

To help build backstory, I ask a question of players’ characters at the beginning of each session: what does your character do for hobbies? How did you arrive here? Etc.

I think this is a great idea. Random questions that have nothing to do with the campaign are one of the best ways to help people flesh out their characters, beyond just playing the current situation.

Two of my favourites: "What would your friends say about you? What would your enemies say about you?" It's an inherently social question, about how they deal with the world - which directly impacts how they roleplay. And it's also a backstory question. It makes them ask, "Well, do I have friends? Do I have enemies?"

Juvenile dragonflies, known as nymphs, live underwater and would presumably be less crunchy than the flying adult dragonflies, given that they're young. I'm sure in reality their exoskeleton is just as stiff as an adult's, but for game purposes, it'd make perfect sense for the nymphs to be tender and delicious.

That's amazing! Just curious however, what other sort of questions do you ask about them, I have a player who also is abit lazy in coming up with backstory stuff, and this method of asking them questions every session is ingenious